When a product such as Dredmor reaches maturity, it is often ported to a mobile tablet. During this awkward time of transition, you will doubtless have certain questions about the changes that your video game is going through. You may have strange feelings and sudden urges, and you may also note your tablet sprouting hair in strange places.

Please rest assured, this is perfectly normal.

Fortunately, Gaslamp Games is here to help you through this time of change and transition with our Dredmor-for-iPad Frequently Asked Questions guide. So here goes:

Q. When will the game be done?
A. “When it’s done.” We’re currently still in pre-alpha, and a lot of stuff still isn’t working right. (For instance: water, textboxes, going downstairs, that kind of thing.) So … yeah, we’re still working out the kinks. We’ll keep you up to date as we know.

Q. Will Dredmor be available for the iPhone?
A. Probably not; we’d have to redraw absolutely everything. The game fits on an iPad because the iPad’s minimum resolution is 1024 x 768 – the same resolution as our minimum game resolution. We’ll test – at some point – to see if the retina display on the iPhone 4S makes this viable, but we don’t think it will work.

Q. Will the game be available for Android?
A. This… is an interesting question. While SDL 1.3 supports Android, at least partly, there are two reasons why we might not go ahead and do this. The first is insufficient demand – my personal experience with Android on previous products have been that Android sales are a very small fraction of iPad sales (in fact, less than the ratio of Linux sales to Windows sales.) Consequently, it’s not entirely clear that this is something that we will actually make money on – especially on the tablet market, where Android tablets are still somewhat of an unknown factor and where the iPad still occupies 75% of the market share.

The second reason why we might not support Android is because the infrastructure for Android is so, so, hideously broken. Again, it’s *worse* than the Linux situation, which is kind of amazing. In order for us to ship on Android, we have to be convinced (more specifically, as the Technical Director for the studio *I* have to be convinced) that we can actually ship an Android version of Dredmor and have it work. Given that there are a number of horror stories floating around about people who test their software on 300 Android devices and get everything working, only to release and have everything explode on Day 1… I’m just not confident that we can do this. It is possible that we might put together an Android release for a *very* limited selection of devices (Kindle Fire, Samsung Galaxy Tab, ASUS EEE Pad Transformer) where we have some hope of having things run in a fashion that we’re happy with. That said, we’re still looking into this, and the iPad port (by virtue of the market share we mentioned above) is still the top priority.

Q. Are you redoing the control scheme? That looks suspiciously like a mouse cursor.
A. Yes. The mouse cursor is in for debugging only; we are reworking the control scheme to make it 85% more Tabletty.

Q. Will there be mod support?
A. Unknown. We would like it, but we are not making any promises.

this could be the best game on ipad if done correctly! been playing the pc version a lot in the last 2 days, and it sounds as if the developers are serious about making it happen! can't believe there isn't way more hype here on toucharcade. Since all of the art assets are already usable from the PC version, hopefully it wont be too long till i'm enjoying this on my new ipad!!!!

A friend just gifted me this game on Steam last night, and after a game I immediately went to look whether there's been any mention of an iPad version. This is awesome!

I won't hold my breath or anything, but I'm just going to put this out there: iCloud support between the iPad and Mac would be really cool. And all those little detailed icons would look great at retina resolution...

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